The next installment in the Barry and Jerry story may be about to unfold.
30 April, 2008
29 April, 2008
I’ll bet Ben Stein didn’t expect
that he’d get the ADL mad at him.
Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.
But he should have known.
Gotta Love VDH
He’s my favorite egghead. Who else can turn a phrase like this and spank Obama with Greek classicism?
Note that when any candidate makes a Faustian bargain with extremists, nemesis eventually catches up with them.
Read the whole (short) thing.
Last Man Standing?
Sitting high atop my Buttle’s World perch, bemusedly surveying the political landscape, I can’t help but wonder if John McCain will win the presidency by default. He may greet November as the only candidate from either party whose campaign didn’t fade, fumble or implode.
Strange days. I’m glad I don’t live anywhere near Denver.
Come November I’ll look either prescient or foolish. Won’t be the first time.
Update:
This is what prescient looks like. Even if it was only a month ago.
DNC Hits Bottom, Digs
We already knew Howard Dean was nuts. Now we know he has no shame.
Apparently Mr. YEEEEAAAAARGH has not learned Obama’s lesson. Let’s review, shall we?
Update:
JD Johannes gets to the bottom line.
Al Qaida is in Iraq. Al Qaida wants the U.S. military out of Iraq.
The Democrats want the U.S. military out of Iraq.
Draw your own conclusions, but I think it is pretty obvious which side Al Qaida is on.
28 April, 2008
Wright’s Christianity
Jeremiah Wright dropped a lot of bombshells at the National Press Club breakfast. Mark Hemmingway caught this one.
MODERATOR: Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the father but through me.” Do you believe this? And do you think Islam is a way to salvation?
WRIGHT: Jesus also said, “Other sheep have I who are not of this fold.”
Is this just PC dhimmitude from a particularly useful idiot, the kind of spineless Christianity we’ve seen before? Very possible. And yet, I wonder again.
In either case, Peter Wehner has coined a lovely turn of phrase.
Reverend Wright is a torpedo aimed straight at the Obama campaign.
Global Warm-Mongering
Mark Steyn scolds the scolds.
The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death. On April 15, the Independent, the impeccably progressive British newspaper, editorialized: “The production of biofuel is devastating huge swathes of the world’s environment. So why on earth is the Government forcing us to use more of it?”
You want the short answer? Because the government made the mistake of listening to fellows like you.
Read the whole thing. Pass it along.
And here I thought I had a low opinion of the ID crowd
John Derbyshire, in high dudgeon, makes a very strong case that Ben Stein and the dishonest creationists who foisted Expelled on the world have committed a blood libel on our civilization. He includes this reminder:
Western civilization has many glories. There are the legacies of the ancients, in literature and thought. There are the late-medieval cathedrals, those huge miracles of stone, statuary, and spiritual devotion. There is painting, music, the orderly cityscapes of Renaissance Italy, the peaceful, self-governed townships of old New England and the Frontier, the steel marvels of the early industrial revolution, our parliaments and courts of law, our great universities with their spirit of restless inquiry.
And there is science, perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, because nowhere else on earth did it appear. China, India, the Muslim world, all had fine cities and systems of law, architecture and painting, poetry and prose, religion and philosophy. None of them ever accomplished what began in northwest Europe in the later 17th century, though: a scientific revolution. Thoughtful men and women came together in learned societies to compare notes on their observations of the natural world, to test their ideas in experiments, and in reasoned argument against the ideas of others, and to publish their results in learned journals. A body of common knowledge gradually accumulated. Patterns were observed, laws discerned and stated.
UN Troops Armed DR Congo Rebels
Yet another tale of corruption and un-peace-keeping on the part of UN “peacekeepers” would seem like a dog bites man story. But notice this nugget:
UN insiders close to the investigation told the BBC they had been prevented from pursuing their inquiries for political reasons.
Our correspondent says that in short, the Pakistanis, who are the largest troop contributors to the UN in the world, were too valuable to alienate.
The largest contributor of troops to the blue helmet brigade is Pakistan. Pakistan?
27 April, 2008
Islam’s Useful Idiots
You must read this article by Bruce Bawer. But take your blood pressure medication first. And keep breakable objects out of arm’s reach.
Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission.
If you thought that Socialism benefited from useful idiots, you ought to contemplate how idiotic Islam’s useful are.
Leading liberal intellectuals and academics have shown a striking willingness to betray liberal values when it comes to pacifying Muslims. Back in 2001, Unni Wikan, a distinguished Norwegian cultural anthropologist and Islam expert, responded to the high rate of Muslim-on-infidel rape in Oslo by exhorting women to “realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”
Mark Steyn, who knows something about Jihad’s efforts to silence critics, summed it up nicely in a different context:
In a scrupulously politically correct age, it’s not offensive to organize a “Kill the police!” demo or to preach that the government invented Aids in order to perpetrate an African-American genocide. You can pull that stuff and still be part of respectable society, hanging out with presidential candidates and whatnot. What’s grotesquely offensive is the chap who’s insensitive enough to point out such statements and associations.
(Steyn further notes that the Muslim Brotherhood may have its filthy fingerprints on his case.)
So allow me to be grotesquely offensive and point out that Islam’s useful idiots and Socialism’s useful idiots appear to be the same idiots.
I’ll go further: Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a heroine. And every Muslim man who beats his wife or forces his daughter into marriage is a pig and a coward. And every idiot, Muslim or not, who wants to impose Sharia law on the world can, to borrow a phrase from a favorite TV show, go frak themselves.
Multiculturalism is death. Or, more precisely, suicide.
26 April, 2008
Someone at the CIA is on the ball
A nice betrayal of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Pakistan, and all for a pittance.
I suspect that the competence of CIA people is proportional to their distance from Washington.
Your Tax Dollars At Work
The State Department (when was the last time it took our side in a war?) is funding jihad.
What is State buying with your money? Well, Islamic da’wa, you may be interested to know, is the “call to Allah” — the summons to Islam. ISNA, as Rabinowitz and Mayer elaborate, is “an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood and named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the ongoing Holy Land Foundation terror funding prosecution,” principally involving the Hamas jihadist terror organization. (Link to NYSun article added.) The Muslim Brotherhood is the ideological engine of modern jihadism, and though it purports to have abandoned violence in favor of other means of persuasion that we should all be governed by Sharia, its mission statement remains: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
25 April, 2008
Voluntary Taxes?
Next time some government hack tries to feed you that BS about our income tax system being “voluntary” just remind them of what happened to Wesley Snipes.
“There is no secret formula that eliminates a person’s tax obligations, nor are there any special exceptions,” he said.
“The majority of Americans pay their taxes timely and accurately. Those who willfully violate the law must be held accountable.”
The jury acquitted him of the felony charges, buying the defense’s argument that he had been duped by bad tax advisors. So, for three misdemeanors he gets three years. Why?
But prosecutors, in their sentencing recommendation, said the jurors’ decision “has been portrayed in the mainstream media as a ‘victory’ for Snipes. The troubling implication of such coverage for the millions of average citizens who are aware of this case is that the rich and famous Wesley Snipes has ‘gotten away with it.’ In the end the criminal conduct of Snipes must not be seen in such a light.”
The government is worried about bad press, so they make an example of him. What is this, Russia? I’m no lawyer, but doesn’t that sound like something that could be brought up while appealing his sentence? Anybody care to bet folding money that the sentence would have been less if he had not been famous?
Voluntary. Hah.
